View full sizeOregonian fileJohn Henry Trullinger, a noted local artist and the uncle of Bryant's first husband, painted this portrait of Louise. The Oregonian called it "wonderfully true to life." By this time, Bryant's radical notions were becoming well known, and rumors swirled that she had posed for the portrait in the nude.

It's March -- a.k.a, Women’s History Month -- so here’s a shout-out to the ladies. The big cities back east always get most of the attention when talk turns to history, but even if you put free love to the side, Portland has its relevant feminist stories to tell. Here’s one:

Ninety-two years ago next month, UO grad Louise Bryant made her triumphant return to Oregon, having transformed herself from middle-class Northeast Portland hausfrau into a glamorous and groundbreaking foreign correspondent. She got her start in journalism as a freelancer for The Oregonian (that’s right, the printed version of the very website you are presently perusing). Well, sort of. She wrote about women’s suffrage and inhumane working conditions for publications like The Masses. For The Oregonian, she wrote about cats and gardening.

Bryant is best known for running off with radical journalist and Portland native John Reed to chronicle the Russian Revolution. They married in 1916, after she divorced her first husband, Portland dentist Paul Trullinger. Reed wrote the lefty classic Ten Days That Shook the World; Bryant penned the lesser-known and more personal Six Red Months in Russia, which was serialized in The Oregonian. Warren Beatty told their stories in the Oscar-winning 1981 flick Reds.

But long before all that derring-do, Bryant was a Portland girl -- which means, of course, she loved animals and the outdoors. She wrote frequently about pets for The Oregonian, and she shows up in stories about the Oregon Humane Society. Here’s an example from a January 24, 1914, story about a cat show: "One 5-year-old girl hunted up Louise Bryant Trullinger, secretary of the show, and demanded a kitten. [The girl] gave way to tears when she learned that there were no kittens to be given away. She refused to be comforted, and her mother's efforts to lure her away were unavailing until the despairing management promised to produce a kitten for her today."

Let’s dip further into The Oregonian’s archives:

For a time, Bryant, who was born in Nevada, lived on a houseboat on the Willamette with Trullinger. She wrote about Portland’s houseboat community in a 1911 article: "Think of jumping out of bed and diving immediately afterwards from the veranda into the refreshing river for a morning plunge! ... It is always cool and pleasant on the river and the air is never otherwise than fresh and wholesome. No dust and clouds of microbes are thrown up by dangerous street-sweeping machines, whizzing autos and streetcars." In another article, she wrote about "two little black bears" that are the "very curious and much admired pets of five bachelors" living on a houseboat at the Oregon Yacht Club.

And while Bryant would become an intrepid pioneer (first as a suffragist, then as a writer), her early journalism in Portland shows that her radicalization was an evolutionary process. One of her Oregonian stories from 1912 is headlined, "Mere Girl Carries Mail Over Difficult Route." Bryant, then 26, begins:

It was with a mingled feeling of doubt and curiosity that I sat on a box in the back room of the Portland Post office waiting for Hildegarde Butz to finish sorting her mail, after which we were to take a 32 1-2-mile ride together. Miss Butz is the first Portland woman to sign a contract to carry mail for Uncle Sam. She has one of the most difficult routes radiating from the Portland office.

View full sizeOregonian fileBryant's reporting on the Russian Revolution was serialized in The Oregonian.

She adds, further down in the story: "The more hills we climbed and descended the more my admiration for Miss Butz grew. She is among the few who look on life through their own eyes, think their own thoughts and live in the real world of struggling, striving humanity. There is no foolish sentimentality about her or any warped ideas."

Soon enough, Bryant would be charged with both foolish sentimentality (about Bolshevik Russia) and warped ideas (she became a sexual libertine who counted Eugene O’Neil and sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne among her lovers). After returning from Russia, she undertook a national lecture tour. She found audiences on her Northwest swing to be "the roughest, finest, most wonderful" anywhere. Portland’s city council, a stuffier, more conservative bunch than the present crew, demanded to see the text of her speech before her appearance at the Keller Auditorium (then called the Civic Auditorium).

Even then, Portland apparently had a taste for radical ideas. It was SRO for Bryant at the Civic, and she seems to have held them in thrall throughout. The Oregonian, neglecting to mention that Bryant once wrote "soft features" for the paper’s women’s pages, insisted that "she is very much the same little radical and vigorous reformer" she had been during her days as Mrs. Paul Trullinger. Even Bryant’s mother, who lived in California, didn't know what to make of her daughter’s celebrity. Bryant wrote to Reed: "She isn’t sure if I’m a Bolshevik or a patriot or what it is all about. But she likes to have me get an ovation anyway."

And if you’d like to commune with some existing history of Bryant’s time in Portland: One of the houses where she lived with Trullinger, on NE 53rd Avenue, is still standing. So is the downtown building where she kept a studio -- at 1033 SW Yamhill, across from the Central Library.